


guilty as charged

by glockenspielium



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F, Lets see where this goes, Multi, Polyamory, Science Sisters, because honestly we are all just super gay for holtzmann
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 13:01:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7685593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glockenspielium/pseuds/glockenspielium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Falling in love with Abby is easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	guilty as charged

Falling in love with Abby Yates is easy.

She’s always had a thing for smart women. It would be nice to say it’s not an elitist thing, but that would be lying, and Holtzman has never been one to be nice, or a liar. She worked it out early on; somewhere between refining the notch of a wink that could make a girl follow her home and perfecting to the minute just how soon she’d be ditching that girl, well before they’d even made it to her street. She’d like to say it was a sense of standards, an expectation that she respects the brains of the bodies she is about to touch- but honestly it’s not even that complex or thoughtful. It’s all the _noise_ that came out of their mouths – useless, senseless garbage. The words would rattle raucously behind her eyes, pounding out vacuous compliments, simpering sirens of monotony, so boring, boring, _boring_.

But Abby is _smart_. She doesn’t act surprised at her theorems, she questions them. She is demanding, she delights in the fact that she doesn’t follow along with every sentence as it’s sprouted speedily and then demands that Holtzmann slow down and explain it _better_ , explain it smarter-er. Abby laughs as Holtzmann points out that smarter-er isn’t a real word, she frowns when the string theory is inversed before her eyes, she writes until her hand aches, in looping characters, sprawling across the whiteboard and then onto butcher’s paper that she pins across the walls, desperate to find more space to fill with the notions she is learning one by one.

After so many years of being the cleverest, Holtzmann hadn’t expected explaining herself to be so hard. Or so exciting. Most people just shut up eventually, or shut her up.

But Abby listens.

She listens with the patient ease of an older sister, even if she explained early on that she’s an only child who should have been a son. She grins at the song lyrics slipped in between syntax and searches through the snappy comments for the sound of Holtzmann's loneliness, but doesn't stop her to discuss it. She turns down Holtzmann’s radio to better hear her words, and remembers to turn it up again when the time for talking is over. 

And Abby also talks, rants about her parents with rolled eyes and dramatic gesticulation as she’s spreading tomato sauce and mustard onto bread with two fingers, shouts down the phone at her landlord as she lugs two enormous bags of mostly books and some stuffed toys into the lab with an apologetic shrug – as if Holtzmann hasn’t been sleeping in here since day one when she noticed that the heater in the gym upstairs was sufficient to elevate the temperature of their lab to not-quite-so-frozen which was more than could be said for the piece of shit apartment she’d been squatting in. Abby mutters quietly under her breath as she is working, as if the words are only real if she utters them aloud, lest they slip away under her fingers and the work of her hands and mind are rendered just as insubstantial as others have threatened them to be.

She gets that about Abby.

There are also the things that she doesn’t get, but is constantly astounded by nonetheless.

The first time they meet, Abby presents her hand, and isn’t disconcerted when Holtzmann doesn’t shake it in return. She dresses more carefully than most people would notice, but doesn’t like to make a big deal of it. She walks with the determination of someone two heads taller and criticises her own work with an unrelenting, dissecting eye. She offers Holtzmann the same scrutiny and a job, and both are accepted with words formed faster than the thoughts could concretely consolidate in her mind. Holtzmann’s always worked best unedited.

The first time they share a bed, Holtzmann is scared, but she has to be brave. There’s a snow storm sweeping through the town, which rattles their windows and wails down the alley behind their lab. She’d resorted to google (god, she hates doing that), but once she had a firm handle on the symptoms of a panic attack, she needs a quick guide on how best to help someone through it, and of all the topics she’s memorised in her thirty-two years on this earth, any first aid beyond rudimentary CRP does not feature. It feels so idiotic, she could tell Abby the precise depolarisation and sympathetic activation causing her symptoms, but she can’t do anything to fix it, not without time and a few experiments to ensure that her mechanism was fool-proof. So she drags her to the mattress and pulls her back until she’s resting up against her chest, so that with every breath, Abby can feel the precise way her lungs fill and expand, and hopefully copy them in time. She pulls her dark hair out from the confines of the tie and coaxes the strands between her fingers. And she talks. Her extensive knowledge of muscarinic antagonists serves some purpose, it seems, when eventually the exhausted Abby relaxes into an uneasy sleep against her as the storm lulls into a restful rumble around them. The storm lasts for five days, but by the time they’ve pushed their mattresses together, it seems foolish to move them apart again. 

The first time she kisses Abby, she wonders if maybe this is what her ma had been talking about, on the pages of her well worn storybooks, all those years ago. Her lips are full and soft, and she tastes like ash and caramel; possibly because she’d been sipping her ridiculously sweet Starbucks coffee only seconds before the trial transmat beamer had blown up in their faces. It’s definitely sooty, and the remains of the device are still smoking on the bench, but Abby’s cold fingers are slipping around the hem of her shirt, sending sparks shooting along the skin she finds there and then Hotlzmann’s got her crowded up against the oven which is definitely not safe but she’s even less inclined than usual to give two flying fucks at this particular moment. It’s unconventional as a first kiss, but then again so is she, so are _they_ , so maybe that’s okay.

She likes the way Abby’s eyes look when they pull apart, wide and wild, blinking slowly. She has beautiful eyes, and Holtzmann frowns, pulling off her rounded glasses and throwing them aside for having the audacity to impede her view. Abby just laughs and raises an eyebrow at Holtzmann’s own pair, which are given a similar treatment seconds later.

She likes the way Abby kisses her with such warmth.

She likes they way they can go back to work, side by side, minutes later as if nothing has changed, as if everything has changed. Their hips bump together as they pass one another, they exchange stolen smirks, their fingertips linger, their pulses soar.

She can work with this.

**Author's Note:**

> This movie was too fantastic for me not to go home and write something right away! Just drabbles for now, may plot something in the future, when my mind is no longer haunted by the gorgeous Kate McKinnon.. xx panfs


End file.
